Friday, March 27, 2015

Manifesting a cosmic man


I am in a magical library of the kind Jung would have loved, full of rare volumes of alchemy, mythology, ancient philosophy. I am in modern clothes, but I act like a Renaissance magus who actually knows what he is doing. I am engaged in the Great Work of creating a kind of Cosmic Man.
    He comes to life as a tall, well-built Caucasian man with fine red-gold hair and trimmed beard. His body is draped with planetary, elemental and zodiacal symbols, clustered especially over the upper torso and lower body. 
    Over his shoulder he wears a loose-flapping banner with the inscription, "Fortunate is he who is able to know the causes of things."

I woke happy and excited.
    I recognized the words on the banner. They are borrowed from Virgil's Georgics, Book 2, line 490. The original Latin is Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, literally "fortunate was he who was able to know the causes of things." I shall have to do some reentry work to recover all the symbols.
   The 19th century image (above) from Jaipur of Vishnu as Cosmic Man has a similar placement of symbols, though as human types the figures are very different. 



No comments:

Post a Comment